Meet the Georgia-Based Software Helping Global Brands Make Their Packaging Recyclable 

Waste collection around the U.S. has never been so vital — or so confusing. 

Anyone who has stood, trash in hand, before a bin with segmented receptacles for landfill, compostables, plastics and aluminum knows just how hard it can be in the moment of disposal to make what could be practically an eternal decision — at least when plastics are involved. 

Now imagine that problem, multiplied across hundreds of jurisdictions, all with varying laws governing material recovery and how these rules should be communicated to the consumer. 

That web is what Athens, Ga.-based CIRT Inc. — Can I Recycle This? — is trying to untangle, moving upstream to the brands deciding how to package and label everything we buy. Those little decisions, accumulated over time, add up to consequential global impact. 

The tech platform was inspired in part by the groundbreaking work of Jenna Jambeck, a University of Georgia professor who received a MacArthur Grant for her research cataloging the journey of consumer plastics to the world’s oceans.

Dr. Jambeck, a CIRT co-founder, showed just how small a proportion of even recyclable plastics were recovered, the rest ending up in landfills or massive swirling trash islands compounded by 8 million metric tons of material each year. She later contributed to a global effort calculating that humans had created 8 billion tons of plastic waste since the 1950s.  

Kat Shayne, who worked with Dr. Jambeck on plastics policy while crafting her master’s thesis at UGA, saw a pattern in her research team’s interactions with business leaders.  

“We had several industry groups and companies come to us and ask about packaging and recycling, and I noticed a trend,” Ms. Shayne told Global Atlanta. “They are asking us the same questions, but they’re all from different companies for industries. I thought we could probably put together a database to try and answer these questions.”

CIRT started in 2018, but at the time the effort was mainly focused on mapping out, to the zip code, existing recycling infrastructure around the U.S. and Canada, then overlaying it with 800 different packaging forms and materials. 

Nearly five years after incorporation, CIRT got its first customers, validating that what had become a valuable platform for researchers could also have its own life as a company— and that it might actually do more good by turning a profit. 

Ms. Shayne stressed that CIRT was “a new concept” that always lived outside of UGA. Still, growing a startup required a mindset shift. 

“When we approached the problem initially, we had that lens from being in the academia space,” she said. “But then when you translate it into the business space, you have to pinpoint what the pain point is, what companies are struggling with at that moment in time.” 

Cities were among the first customers, but CIRT quickly pivoted to brands whose struggles were obvious: packaging laws that were “fragmented, outdated and impossible to act on.” 

CIRT, she said, gave companies a sort of “Quickbooks” or “CRM” for their packaging, taking the burden of compliance off their shoulders just as more states began to introduce new regulatory frameworks. 

Seven states have frameworks passed, while three — California, Colorado and Oregon — are requiring reporting under what are known as Extended Producer responsibility, or EPR, requirements. Before CIRT, many companies lacked the data they needed to comply, opening them up to potential fines.  

And the worst thing for the environment, Ms. Shayne said, would be for the companies — some of the largest in the world —to simply give up and shell out.

While there has been a backlash against so-called Environmental Social Governance, or ESG, mandates, Ms. Shayne noted that consumers still demand increased transparency into supply chains as they seek to parse fact from marketing when it comes to sustainability. 

“They’re saying, ‘Don’t smokescreen me — don’t tell me something that is just marketing. Show me data, show me the real stuff behind it,’” she said. “That’s where I‘ve always stood.” 

CIRT offers a variety of ways to help brands make solid claims of impact while helping buyers do the right thing with waste. With CIRT Check, companies can provide QR codes on their packaging that guide consumers with location-specific disposal instructions and back up their sustainability claims. CIRT Onsite helps venues offer geofenced disposal instructions. Data collection is ongoing and CIRT is continuing to work toward democratizing its data for consumers to the extent possible.

“We built an AI bot application with Gemini that you can scan and it will tell you where to recycle (a product),” Ms. Shayne said. 

As they have since CIRT’s founding, packaging companies are also coming into the fold, many of them becoming suppliers that CIRT can pair with brands seeking to innovate around packaging design. 

But as the company, now run by 10 employees and contractors, looks toward a Series A capital raiseto build on its early investments from angels, Engage VC and Georgia-Pacific, Ms. Shayne notes that it’s returning to the same principles that animated its founding and made it a preferred software provider with the Consumer Brands Association, which represents 1,000 of the top brands across food, beverages, cosmetics and household products.  

“As we have honed our focus, it’s really been on that packaging design upstream, finding how it fits downstream through the regulatory lens and through that impact lens,” she said. 

By making recycling simple and convenient, CIRT is also encouraging the waste management industry, a $140 billion juggernaut in the U.S., to see materials not just as trash, but as potential treasure. 

“There is room for the thought process that the high-value materials that go into the recycling system should be renewed somewhere. They are feedstocks for something.”